Exploring issues in 21st Century Learning, Transforming Education, EdTech, and my PostDoc Work at University of Hawaii

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Monthly Archives: September 2016

There is a quote from the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge: “Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink”. One of the continuing investigations for us this year is the issue of water. It ties nicely with some of the physical chemistry work that we are trying to do. Water has so many wonderful properties that make it special, including life on earth itself. The chemistry of water and its role in society provide so many different ways that we might approach it. Today, our work centered around our community water supply, where it comes from, how it is distributed, what are the ways that the Native Hawaiian people viewed this, and probably most pressing: is it safe to drink and is it secure?

We took a field trip today to the Waihee Water Tunnel (info here). We were ably guided by Arthur Aiu, community relations specialist for the board of water supply. After a 1.5 mile hike in, we entered a tunnel that extended into the mountainside for over 1/4 mile (1500 feet) and came upon the water that is directed to most of the communities on the windward side of the island. The graphic below gives you a sense of where the water comes from.

Info graphic that explains how water comes to the islands and is stored through a natural process

The purpose of this post is not really to teach you about where our water comes from, but it’s worth mentioning that Hawaii is really a special place in how the conditions of weather and mountains produce large reserves of water that are located both in compartments in the mountains called Dikes, as well as aquifers below the island that hold water. The students learned about how the water gets there, how it’s removed, why it’s handled the way it is and even what safety concerns there are about water quality and how the board of water supply manages that. For example, Arthur mentioned that all water on Oahu is treated with small amounts of chlorine to control for bacterial growth – that’s something that I had not been aware of, but we know from our chemistry work the reactive nature of chlorine and students should have been making the connection to why chlorine is such an ideal substance to interact with living matter to break apart contaminants. In other parts of the island where the water has become more contaminated from organic pesticides, activated charcoal is used. Another example of chemistry helping keep our water drinkable.

As you can see from the pictures posted below, and more here (Flickr account here) the water literally filters down through the rocks and drips through the fissures that have occurred through different volcanic events that have happened over time. The water that we were observing only takes about nine months to filter from the rainfall down through the mountain to these caverns, although it takes 25 years or more for the water to filter all the way down to the aquifer located below the island. The challenge for the students was to really consider how do we protect and ensure this precious resource since all we can plan to use is the water that we have here on the island.

Hiking into the valley

Arthur AiuExplains the way that the water collects in Hawaii’s mountains and aquifers

Our happy group before entering the tunnel

Arthur Aiu Explains both the Hawaiian legends around the water, as well as the structure of the compartments in the bulkheads

This leads us to the bigger question that were going to explore over the next couple of months. Our visit today was water that feeds the Windward communities, but there is a bigger problem brewing in Honolulu because the main source of water there at Halawa is in danger of serious contamination from fuel tanks that were placed above the source of water by the Navy in the 1940s (short history of that here , excellent presentation slides from Auguust 2016 meeting here ). Our next steps for the class are to understand this problem more deeply, attend the October 6 public hearing that will have presentations by both the Navy, and the board of water and start working with our city Council to figure out ways that our students might be able to be helpful. Our ultimate goal is to present information to the City Council in November to have them better understand the issues that are affecting our community and this problem. As always, our good work continues as our learning gets deeper…

Information about the October 6 meeting about the water situation at Red Hill/Halawa

I have been challenging myself in my work in MPX to think more deeply and purposefully about how to move my learners into habits of mind of their discipline. Last year when math (Alg 2) was part of my work I really tried to drive in to the habits of mind of mathematicians. This year we realigned our curriculum and my focus has been in NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards) – particularly Integrated Science 1 which has topics in physical chemistry. The work I have been developing harkens back to my first year teaching (1982 – was it really that long ago?) when I was working with 8th grade students teaching a program called IPS (Introductory Physical Science). In the summer of 1983 I attended a 2 week workshop run by Haber-Schaim on the pedagogical approach to teaching IPS. I was too green a teacher at the time to appreciate all the depth and complexity of learning theory they moved us through that summer, but I know it left a lasting impact on me because now I know what to call it – constructivist learning. I realized while I am writing this I still have that lab journal somewhere and I should go and pull it out because I am sure it is full of gems that I could rediscover and still use in my students’ work. Let me take a few key ideas that I learned form that experience that still are part of MY DNA as a teacher, though reinforced, elaborated and creatively redesigned in my new “Hines 3.0” teaching framework as we develop our MPX program.

Discrepant Events:
One of the ways to drive an important question or to gain attention is by exposing something we don’t understand well or at all. In the words of the modeling pedagogical approach that came out of the work of Wells and Hestenes ( http://modeling.asu.edu) we need to displace learner’s naïve theories with more complete ones and one of the ways to expose that is by showing them an event that doesn’t play out the way their naïve model shows. In the IPS curriculum, the first event the students are exposed to is the decomposition of wood splints into its constituent matter (solids, liquids, gasses) which drives a semester long investigation into understanding better what wood or truly any matter is fundamentally made of.

Essential Questions and Modeling:
At its core, the entire course was based on a critical essential question that came from the discrepant event mentioned above. In a sentence, it was “what is matter made of?”. All of the experimental designs and all the community building that happened after that was to come up with a high fidelity model of matter based on experimental work that the class conducted day by day, and week by week.

Inquiry, Discovery and Constructivism
In so much of traditional curriculum including science, there is a focus about memorizing the answer from experts, whether it is Newton’s second law of motion, or what events led to a important historical juncture. The role of inquiry at a deep level is to allow the students to form the questions and reach their own conclusions – certainly scaffolded or shaped by the expert (teacher) knowledge and experience, but in a well-designed learning environment, it is the learner who constructs the knowledge, not dished to them by a teacher, text, or other expert. Ultimately, that is what displaces their naïve theories, because it is formed and informed by their experience and active decision-making.

Habits of Mind:
As a learner moves from a naïve thinker to an expert thinker, they inherently begin to own the habits of mind of that discipline whether it is scientist, mathematician, historian, writer, etc. This is not taught passively, the learner needs to walk the walk and do the work of the discipline. No more than you would want a medical doctor treating patients who had not gone through a series of apprenticeships in which they were with actual patients under guidance challenging themselves to address many patients’ health needs to build the right kind of thinking and decision-making that is inherent in their discipline, we need to put students in our classes in those same shoes – developing the essential questions, designing the experiments, making meaning of the data, coming to generalized agreements and reporting it in a way that indicates a deep satisfactory understanding of their research.

Lab Practicals:
One of the things I loved most about teaching IPS were the moments when students were given a challenge that was based on them applying the skills and knowledge they had acquired. Certainly the most significant one was the culminating “sludge test” that students were given at the end of the first semester. Given a flask with a mixture of solids and liquids, the students were challenged to separate and identify all of the materials in their solution. Typically, no two students got the same mixture, so there was no way to game the system and look at what someone else was doing. That kind of real application of knowledge by applying your understanding to a novel situation is the kind of culminating experience I aspire to organize for my students.

As I write this, it strikes me even more so how fundamentally my first teaching of IPS has affected my long-term view of science learning in my classroom. I certainly don’t win that battle every day, but I know the direction I am pointing, and that is already a better place to be rather than just following off-the-shelf curriculum.

So, to that end, this week our MPX students were designing an inquiry lab into properties of matter, not too much unlike IPS. Instead of using the IPS framework, I borrowed some inquiry labs from Vernier Software. I’m using these as a starting point for our students to design experiments to investigate properties of matter that will broaden and deepen their understanding of the properties of matter which are critical for them over the next month as they work on their chemistry and conflict projects. Our good work continues…

Students generating questions about their research project should be able to address

Students generating questions about their research project should be able to address

Students generating questions about their research project should be able to address

Goal of the board is to summarize and to inform the class about experimental results

As we continued our work this week for our project on chemistry and conflict, our science class launched into a series of investigations into the properties of matter. Instead of everyone doing the same activity, which does insure that everyone gets to the same place, but limits how far we can go, we started the investigation of eight different inquiry labs that looked at reactions, physical properties, and other investigations about chemicals. All of these came from the excellent Vernier resource “Investigating Chemistry through Inquiry” click here.

Three broad goals frame this series of investigations:
– Understanding the process by which we asked questions about the nature of matter
– Considering the experimental designs that can deepen our understanding of the nature of matter
– Developing a common set of terminology about properties of matter that we can construct together and adopt into our language

This work will take a couple of more weeks since we only have a couple of class periods each week to work on, but there is already been the starting of questions about what were seeing in the nature of matter which is a good place for us to be. We have also been having the students continue their research and build their outlines now that we have settled on either a podcast or a “TED”-like talk for their final presentation.

While we have been working on this, I have been ruminating about some of the work that was part of my doctoral research. In the process of thinking about how learning happens, one of the phrases that I found valuable was the idea of knowledge construction.
As Scardamalia says: “Following the definitions of Garrison et al. (2001) and Gunawardena et al. (1997), knowledge construction … is understood as the process whereby students undertake social exchange with their instructor or peers in order to create and apply new understandings that resolve dilemmas and/or issues they are facing. The closer the students are to resolving their issues, the more advanced their level of knowledge construction.”

It is of note to me that knowledge construction is conversational and therefore an observable phenomena. One of the things we’ve been talking about in our work recently is the ways by which we can observe and assess students progress towards skills, competencies and even knowledge. Scardamalia researched and developed 12 principles to help examine the kinds of ways that knowledge building can and should occur. This list isn’t hierarchical, nor is it a checklist, but it provides insight into the different ways that the dialogical way that knowledge construction happens can be observed. The 12 are

The description for each one of these principles is located here. (It would be a little bit long to include all of that on this post). A couple of examples may help explain what I’m thinking about.

The principal called Improvable ideas we often see in our classrooms where students develop an idea or a notion that they want to act on, and as they try and implement they shape it and refine it through feedback from their peers and their teacher.

Real ideas, authentic problems is centered in our work for MPX since we try and locate all of our essential questions around a real or authentic problem.

Community knowledge matters greatly to us because it emphasizes the value that a community brings to understanding an idea and adopting it as a group.

Considering all of these principles affirms and challenges the work we do in how we design our learning, and the ways that we observe how students construct and co-construct their meaning through transactional exchanges with each other. Over the course of this year, it is my hope to develop better systems to record this as it happens so that it can become a more powerful part of our assessment in the service of learning.

Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2010). A brief history of knowledge building. Canadian
Journal of Learning and Technology, 36(1).

**Since this was a short week, I surprisingly and somewhat irresponsibly didn’t get any pictures of what happened in class to document and support the summary.**

Three themes ran through my work this week – two of them centered in our MPX classroom work and one that was a broader professional wondering and conversation.

A Sense of Wonder
In our MPX work we dove into our Chemistry and Conflict Unit. The students were given their groups and we talked about the power and challenge in the way humans extract and manipulate the earth’s resources. We looked at a short 10 minute clip from the excellent NOVA show “Hunting for the Elements” which focused on the extraction of gold (clip here: https://youtu.be/G04h9kK3ZJs?t=4m). It both showed the Chemistry involved in materials and their access, but also left us wondering about the ways we do this – the use of Lead, Cyanide and other dangerous materials arise in possible conflicts – health and well being, social and economic forces and environmental impacts. Their project will be focusing on one compound (cotton/cellulose, sugar/sucrose, caffeine, gunpowder, as examples) and they will be investigating the chemistry, history and the conflicts that are part of that compound’s use.

A Sense of Scale
In order to start the real understanding of the nature of chemistry, we started with a lab designed to measure the size of a molecule. To launch we first looked at the classic “Powers of Ten” from Eames https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0. I saw this 40 years ago when I was in school and I still think it is one of the best short science films ever made. If we are to truly understand the natural world around us we must have a sense of scale and wonder about the very large and the very small. We then conducted an experiment to actually measure the size of a molecule: in our case the classic Oleic Acid Chemistry lab. What is fascinating is that Benjamin Franklin conducted an experiment much like this over 200 years ago. Conducting this experiment will give us a sense of scale and help us move from the visible to the microscopic and “nanoscale” measure that molecules are found.

Planning for the measurement

Setting up the apparatus

Measuring the size of a molecule

A disclaimer: as a science teacher for over 35 years, I have very strong feelings about science education. Although my secondary school science experience was primarily a bunch of facts I learned, I believe strongly that the real task of science education is to have students DO the science. The goal is not to “cover” science. To cover means to “obscure from view”. The real goal is to UNCOVER science through well planned and coordinated discovery and consensus that happens for real scientists, which I want my learners to be. In science if we already know the answer, why conduct the experiment? In our classroom our investigations better be designed to uncover a need to know and an agreement about what it helped us better understand.

A Sense of Humility
Lastly, a couple of great reads from this week that com to me from my Community of Practice that loves talking and sharing about Deeper Learning in schools. The first was from one of our parents, Adrienne who understands MPX and shared an article “Tackling the ‘soft’ skills gap
How you can prepare STEM students for employment” https://t.co/Dj4aDzbQX7. A wonderful read that emphasizes how important the “soft skills” like communication, collaboration and planning are so critical to develop in students, and how poorly prepared most are when they go to higher ed, enter the workforce and life in general.

The second was from good friend Melissa who shared an article in the Washington Post from Carol Black “What the modern world has forgotten about children and learning”. https://t.co/TXtpLzGx4Y This was too long an article to summarize effectively and do justice to but she explores the intersection between schools and learning and what history, native peoples, cognitive science and experience tell us about allowing children to learn the way they were meant to. One example of a marvelous statement from her: “This is when it occurred to me: people today do not even know what children are actually like. They only know what children are like in schools.”

The two articles give me a sense of continued humility about the work we do in schools in general and in our Mid-Pacific eXploratory program in general. I hope to always keep a sense of wonder, hope and humility in this marvelous learning journey.